Author(s):

A series of religious works, written in early eighteenth-century England, present themselves as dialogues involving fictional Jewish characters: ‘a Rabbi’ or simply ‘a Jew’. What did they stand for? The present essay explores this elusive dialogic device and its (often unexpected) implications.
Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939), whose fields of interest include European history, cultural studies and historiography, has taught at the University of Bologna, UCLA and the Scuola Normale of Pisa. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungs Prize (2007) and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400–1700 (2010).
The lecture was delivered on May 25, 2013.